Embedding Python and built-in types

[Jeff Epler]

On Fri, Nov 29, 2002 at 10:04:11PM +0100, Mickael Putters wrote:
> Well, I was talking about the assignment operator, maybe it's not =.
> Yeah well guess I'll have to modify the source, I thought maybe there would
> be a way to do that already present in Python/C.
> Anyway, thanks.

There is no "assignment operator for integers".  The code to execute
    x = v
is the same no matter the type of v (or the type x may have had before the
assignment, as long as you ignore the possible destructor call on decref).
(In C, for a function local variable x, it's basically a decrement of the
reference count of the old local, an increment of the reference count of
'v', and a store of the 'v' in the locals array)  "Everything is a
reference"

If you want to override assignments like
    o.x = v
then you can override __setattr__ for the object o.  Similarly,
there are __setitem__ and __setslice__.  In 2.2 and newer, when you
subclass object you can use property() to do the same thing as __setattr__
in a nicer way.

Jeff